[EM] STAR

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 8/19/23 11:11, Colin Champion wrote:
> Kevin - I think I agree really. It's a debate about utilitarianism. 
> There's a shallow objection to adding utilities, which is that they may 
> not be suitably scaled, and a more serious one that considerations of 
> justice etc may enter into people's moral judgements, and that these 
> don't lend themselves to a utilitarian calculus. Different objective 
> functions will have different optima. But it's one thing to cricitise 
> fpdk's model, and another to criticise the conclusion drawn from it.
>     And this is why I'm still puzzled by what Forest is saying. If 
> fpdk's model is what I assume it to be, I don't see how there's room to 
> improve on cardinal voting, or how cardinal voting can be only 'not too 
> bad'. Perhaps Forest has another objective function in mind, based on 
> consensus rather than utilities, but I'm not sure what it is or whether 
> it's really an improvement.

Forest's model is a sort of generalization of the friendly pizza setting 
to where people are strategic. That is, he considers a situation where 
the honest utilities are

60: A (100) > B (80) > C (0)
40: C (100) > B (80) > A (0)

and then he observes that with any sort of cardinal method passing 
InfMC, the majority can force their outcome, so a large electorate might 
well do:

60: A (100) > B (0) > C (0)

and then the 40% minority has no way to respond that doesn't end up with 
their hated outcome.

So the whole motivation for the setting is, given that the honest 
utilities are as above, how do we incentivize strategic voters to 
express that information? And ideally without leaving too much to 
chance, or having awful expected utility.

In a pizza setting, presumably the friends know each other well enough 
and don't want to ruin their friendship over pizza, so the best outcome 
will happen anyway.

>     As I recall, Amartya Sen goes to town in distancing himself from 
> utilitarianism. In an extreme case (which I'm not sure Sen would 
> reject), collective utility might be an increasing function of the 
> utility of the worst-off member of society, and a decreasing function of 
> everyone else's. Obviously no monotonic transformation of individual 
> utilities can reconcile this with utilitarianism.

I know that he objected to Homo Economicus (there's that post office 
quote from Rational Fools), but I didn't know he distanced himself from 
utilitarianism in general. But then there's much of his that I haven't read.

-km